Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

Arthur Koestler said that every communist who stayed in the Communist Party in the face of all the evidence had a secret explanation for what was happening, and this could not be discussed with friends and comrades. Some of the communists I knew had decided that yes, the reported crimes were true – though of course not as bad as the capitalist press said – but that Comrade Stalin could not possibly know about what was going on. The truth was being kept from Uncle Joe. My rationalization, my ‘secret belief – and it certainly could not be discussed with anyone but Jack – was that the leadership of the Soviet Union had become corrupt but that waiting everywhere in the communist world were the good communists, keeping their counsel, and they would at the right time take power, and then communism would resume its march to the just society, the perfect society. There was just one little thing: I didn’t realize Uncle Joe had murdered them all.

And then there was this business of Britain’s class system. It shocked me – as it does all colonials. Britain is two nations, all right … though it is a bit better now – not much. When I first arrived, my Rhodesian accent enabled me to talk to the natives – that is, the working class – for I was seen as someone outside their taboos, but this became impossible as soon as I began talking middle-class standard English: this was not a choice; I cannot help absorbing accents wherever I am. A curtain came down – slam. I am talking about being treated as an equal, not of the matey, rather paternal ‘niceness’ of the upper classes. And then I found that people who had suffered out the thirties on tea and bread and margarine and jam, who had been for years unemployed, who lived in filthy slums, voted Tory.

An incident: One of my RAF friends from Rhodesia took me to lunch and said, ‘You could learn to pass. Women are good at it.’ This was meant kindly: he had taken me out to lunch to say this. He did not understand when I said that I had no intention of learning to ‘pass’. People did not necessarily admire his kind. Only six or seven years later, with the advent of the (so-called) angry young men, that generation, it would become unnecessary to justify this stand, but then it was necessary. Uncomfortable, embarrassing for both sides.

An incident: With another man, also ex-RAF, I went into a pub in Bayswater. It was the public bar. We stood at the counter, ordered drinks. All around the walls, men sat watching us. They were communing without words. One got up, slowly, deliberately, came to us, and said, ‘You don’t want to be here [rather, ’ere]. That’s your place.’ Pointing at the private bar. We meekly took ourselves there, joining our peers, the middle class. This kind of thing goes on now. Foreigners, returning natives, complain about the class system, but the British say – both classes – You don’t understand us, and continue as before. The working classes, the lower classes, have ‘internalized’ their station in life.

When in this mood, a bitter criticism of Britain, my set of mind was identical – but I saw this only later – with that of the people who became communists in the thirties: because of that grim and grimy poverty. And, too, with the people who went off to the Spanish Civil War, because of anger when the French and British governments refused to supply arms to the legitimate government, while Hitler and Mussolini armed Franco. A deep shame persisted in many people I met then. (Does this kind of shame, over the behaviour of one’s government, still exist? I think not – an innocence has gone.) This shame caused some people to become traitors, and spies. The Spanish Civil War had left a painful legacy. People have forgotten how badly the refugees from Spain were treated, kept in camps near the border for years, as if they were criminals, to be punished. Well into the sixties, there were a couple of pubs in Soho where intensely poor Spaniards met to talk about how the world had forgotten them, and yet they had been the first to stand up to the Nazis, to the fascists. There are cynics who say that that was their crime.

And so I joined ‘the Party’, which is how it was generally referred to. I hated having a Party card. I hated joining anything. I hated and hate meetings. I merely record this … a tangle of contradictory, lunatic emotions and behaviour. Later, so very much later, quite recently, in fact, an explanation of why so many people stuck with the Communist Party, long after they should have left, came to me. But for now, enough.

There was another thing: I had seen too many of the kind who run around saying, ‘I am a communist,’ but wouldn’t dream of joining the Party. I despised them. Quite soon, in London, there would be a new generation of young people saying, ‘I am a communist,’ to shock the bourgeoisie, to annoy mummy and daddy, to give themselves and others an enjoyable frisson.

I was interviewed by Sam Aaronivitch, cultural commissar. He was a very young man, lean, stern, military in style, with the grim, sardonic humour of the times. He had been a very poor boy, from the East End. The Young Communist League had been his education but not his nursery, because he was a Jew and one of a people of a Book. I have several times been told by children of the Jewish East End how they listened to fathers, uncles, elder brothers, even mothers, argue politics, philosophy, religion, around meal tables on which there might be hardly enough to eat. Why had ‘the Party’ chosen a young man who had read nothing of modern literature, and was not interested in the arts, to represent culture? The interview was in the Communist Party headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden. (‘King Street says…’ ‘Those idiots in King Street…’ ‘I was summoned to King Street, but I told them that…’) He heard me out, like an officer interviewing a rookie, and said he was intrigued to meet an intellectual who wanted to join the Party, when most of them were leaving it, and he looked forward to reading my denunciations of the Party when I left. Then he took me on a tour of the East End, where he had grown up. Sam does not remember doing this, but it is one of the vividest of my memories of those early days in London. He was showing me a culture already dead, which he regretted, because of its guts and its cohesiveness. Sam has had a various life, or perhaps one should say lives: one of them as ‘the Balliol Marxist’. Sometimes we meet, when he is sprinting and I am ambling across Hampstead Heath. We reminisce: I remember this, he remembers that – for instance, that Peter used to spend weekends and play with his daughter Sabrina. He is now helping the Bangladeshi community who live in the streets where he grew up. The Bangladeshis in East London are people of a Book, but for some reason theirs does not do for them what the Jews’ Book did for them, producing the passionately polemical, intellectual, clever people who were able to rise above their poverty to invigorate the worlds of learning, business, and the arts. The children do not grow up hearing fathers, mothers, uncles, elder brothers, argue about religion, politics, literature; they do not hear poetry and bits from great novels quoted in support of arguments. When they go to school they do not do brilliantly, as did the poor Jews who lived before them in those streets.

One of the reasons some found it hard to leave the Party was precisely because there were so many colourful, extraordinary people in it. Good people, generous, kind, clever.

I shall mention two out of many. Once, when I was so short of money I didn’t know what to do, thought I would have to give up trying to live on my earnings and get a job, I got a letter quite out of the blue from people I did not know, communists, who wrote to say they had heard I was hard up, they liked my books, and enclosed one hundred pounds. That was a lot of money then. They did not want me to return it, but when I had enough, they would like me to send it on to someone who needed it, with the same request: to hand it on to someone in need. I shall be forever grateful to these people, whom I never met.

A bit later, when feeling imprisoned by the stratifications of the class system, I asked the Communist Party to arrange a visit for me to a mining community. I found this village, Armsthorpe, near Doncaster, grim, depressing; and yet it had been recently built and the people in it felt themselves lucky compared with families living in some of the old villages. A miner, his wife, three adolescent children. He had been a communist for years, and so had she. The house was full of books: I saw no other books in the houses of the village. They listened to music on the radio, and plays. They talked about how Sybil Thorndike had brought a company to play Shakespeare to the miners in the middle of the war. Everyone in the community remembered this. These two had travelled to the Soviet Union and to other communist countries. That was before mass tourism; they were the only travelled people in the village. He was a father figure, or unofficial representative; people dropped in all the time to ask his advice. Everything he said about the mining community, about Britain, about his life – the usual story of bitter poverty in the twenties and thirties – was full of information and good sense. Everything he said about the Soviet Union and the communist world was nonsense. To have said to this man, What you admire so much is an illusion, and Stalin is a monster – that would have killed something in him: hope, a belief in humankind. This kind of dichotomy, on one side everything that was sound and sensible and honest, and on the other a mirage of lies, was common.

I used to lie awake, for the two weeks of my visit, in the living room on a sofa immediately under their bedroom and hear him coughing just above my head. He had lung disease from the pit, and he knew he would die soon. He wouldn’t allow his children to go near the mines; it was a life for a dog.

Walking with him through the street, I saw a group of young miners, just up from the pit, wearing cheap best suits and red scarves, having showered in the pithead baths. They were off to Doncaster for the evening. They greeted my host, nodded to me. The old miner was full of an angry tenderness for them: what were they eating, they didn’t look well, those scarves weren’t enough to keep them warm. You could see their affection for him.

I used this experience in a short story, ‘England Versus England.’

My Party card was in fact delayed. I had been invited to go to the Soviet Union for the Authors World Peace Appeal: that kind of inspirational organization flourished then. It had been started by Naomi Mitchison and Alex Comfort. Few people could be found who would go. The atmosphere was such that I got letters and telephone calls saying that I would disappear into a concentration camp. When I said that it was hardly likely that the Union of Soviet Writers would allow eminent guests to disappear – surely bad publicity for them? – I was told (like Moidi Jokl with Gottfried), ‘You don’t understand anything about communism. It would serve you right if you were bumped off.’

There were six of us: Naomi Mitchison herself. Her cousin Douglas Young, because he understood Russian. Arnold Kettle, a well-known Marxist literary critic from Leeds University. A. E. Coppard, the short-story writer. Richard Mason, the author of The Wind Cannot Read, a best-selling novel from the war, about a young English soldier in love with a half-caste nurse. And myself, a very new writer. This, we knew, was hardly the level of literary repute the Russians must have been hoping to attract for the first visit of writers from the West since the war – this was 1952.

There was a preliminary meeting, passionate and polemical, violent. Alex Comfort hated that there would be a communist on the delegation, Arnold Kettle, who would try to pull the wool over our eyes and feed us lies. Naomi refuted this. She knew Arnold, who was a sweet young man. A. E. Coppard, as innocent as a babe about politics, had gone to the Wrotslav Peace Conference and fallen in love with communism, as if he had been given a potion. The meeting developed into a plan with detailed instructions, from Alex Comfort, on how to outwit Arnold. I think Richard Mason was present.

Meanwhile the Party had decided it was not a good thing to have two communists on the trip; one was enough. They told me not to join, formally, until after I returned. This made me uncomfortable, put me at once in a false position. Deception w-as not, really, in my nature. An immediate, direct openness, often criticised as tactlessness, was more my line.

Discussing it later with the knowledgeable, I was told that this was typical communist tactics. I was from the very start put in a position where I was involved in a dishonest act and could be exposed for it. I believed that, but not for long, because I began to see something much deeper. Why was it that anywhere near the Party, facts became twisted, people said things which you knew – and they must have known – were untrue? The devil is described as the Father of Lies, a resonant phrase, suggesting other, older phrases, like ‘Realm of Lies’. I have come to think that there is something in the nature of communism that breeds lies, makes people lie and twist facts, imposes deception. What is this thing? This force? One cannot believe one word that emanates from a communist source. Communism is indeed a realm of lies. Stalin, the great deceiver, was only partly responsible, because it was Lenin, the exemplar, who provided the blueprints. ‘Disinformation’ was – is? – only a crystallization, a formalization, of communism’s deepest nature. But these are deeper waters than I know how to plumb: I am sure, though, that there is something here that lives well beyond the daylight world of common sense and simple causes.

We were an improbable assortment of people. First, Naomi Mitchison. She was one of the writers who had broken new ground for women in the thirties, particularly with the novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen. She was a town councillor in Scotland, a farmer, and, with her husband, Dick Mitchison, who was a member of Parliament, an energetic member of the Labour Party. A. E. Coppard wrote some of the best of English short stories, gentle, wry, humorous – and sharp-eyed, like himself. But unfortunately, falling in love with communism had not done much for his clarity of vision. Richard Mason claimed he was going to the Soviet Union because the year before he had gone to Lourdes and thought this would be a nice contrast, and as piquant an experience. But he was deceptive, played the role of philistine, a pipe-smoking tweedy Englishman, phlegmatic and silent. In fact, he was a romantic soul. Arnold Kettle was on this delegation because Naomi had invited him and because the Party had agreed to it. I had written a well-reviewed novel and short stories.

When we met at the airport, five of us looked with suspicion, or with wariness, at Arnold Kettle, but almost at once his calm and good sense made him the mentor of the group. This often happened: communists, seen as demons, seemed disproportionately sane when actually met.

Our opinions about the Soviet Union could hardly have been more diverse, but we were made one partly because of the hysterical attentions of the newspapers, which caused us to close ranks, and partly because of Arnold’s insistence that we should present a united front, regardless of our differences. This had to be the party line, from King Street and – presumably – the Soviet Union. It surprised the ‘right wing’ – Naomi and Douglas – and upset A. E. Coppard, because he wanted only to embrace communism publicly and for ever on behalf of the whole British nation. The point was, he was quite unpolitical, had not been, as it were, inoculated against politics, and his first introduction to it had overthrown him. Richard Mason was unpolitical by nature and intention. So Arnold and I found ourselves holding the centre ground, which certainly suited my temperament and, of course, my sense of importance. I think now that if we had quarrelled publicly, in front of the Russians, we would at least have presented a fairer picture of British attitudes towards communism, but with every hour together we found ourselves feeling more and more British, and patriots. This united front was matched as soon as we met the Russians, for they were all old-fashioned nationalists. This sounds a simple statement, to be met now by: Well, of course! But nationalism of this sort had nothing to do with the purities of Utopian Communism, which planned the mutual love of all mankind. To listen to our hosts talking like Colonel Blimp made me remember, most uncomfortably, the hours we had spent in the group in Southern Rhodesia, trying to make sense of the twists and turns in the ‘Party Line’. Masterpieces of dialectic, they were, and particularly from Gottfried, manipulating Marxist verities. If the Russians had known how local communists, all over the world, wove their airy structures of explanation of why the Russian comrades were doing this and that improbable thing, they would have laughed their heads off. How right I had been to say – and Gottfried too – that no real Communist party anywhere would recognize our idealistic vapourings. But to encounter this crude, simplistic nationalism here was not what I had expected, and yet why not? The Russians, or rather Stalin, had never made any secret of it. These mental discomforts I discussed with Arnold, for the others would not have understood us. We concluded that the war had been so terrible for the Russians that of course they had to retreat to nationalism. Russians had to be forgiven everything because of that war. They had lost more people in the siege of Leningrad than the British and Americans combined had lost in the whole war. This was why Czech Jack kept saying to me, ‘You people here simply don’t understand.’ [‘The Soviet Union’ and ‘Russia’ were interchangeable in those days, improbable though that sounds now.]

I have to say that these memories of that trip are not shared – for instance, with Naomi, as I discovered when twenty-five years or so later I found we were not remembering the same things: it was not a question of remembering the same things differently but as if we had been on two different trips. This experience, which was shocking to me, began my attempts to understand the extraordinary slipperiness of memory: before that, I had taken it for granted that people with the same experiences would remember the same things. Particularly when they were as vivid as those during our trip to Russia. I did better with Arnold; our memories did match, more or less.

I have seldom been so torn, astonished, disappointed, alert … alive, as during that trip, and my memories of it are among the most vivid I have. There is a basic question about memory: why do we remember this and not that, particularly when this is not necessarily important, is on the contrary mere trivia. We remember what we do, I think, because for one reason or another we were particularly alert, paying attention, present in the occasion – because most often we are not present but thinking about what we had for breakfast, or what we will do tomorrow, or recalling what we said to So-and-so. Why we are more alive and awake at some times than others is a separate question, leading to very deep waters. Well, I was certainly present, every minute, during that trip, and that is the reason for my memories of it. I had often decided to write about it but then decided not. What was the point? Anything said or written about the Soviet Union was bound to be greeted by emotions so violent, so enraged, or so partisan that no calm judgement could be expected. Besides, what I remembered was not necessarily flattering to my fellow delegates. Of course, this was bound to be true of what they thought about me.

But now all there is left is the music of the distant drum …

Our official host was the Union of Soviet Writers, headed by one Alexei Surkov, whose name was soon to become synonymous with the oppression of decent writers by Soviet ideology. He was an ordinary-looking man, in the style Soviet officials used then to convince: bluff, open, take-me-or-leave-me, honest-John Surkov, the friend of friends of the Soviet Union. Behind him was the KGB, monitoring and directing every word and action. Did we know this? Yes, but our view of the KGB was naive, to say the least. Also coloured by arrogance. We joked, in our hotel rooms, that the KGB would be tapping our telephones and the concierges examining our belongings, but it was of no concern to us; we were from the West and did not go in for that sort of thing. We did not see ourselves as useful tools for the KGB. Correctly, as it turned out, though they would have been pleased if we had become their tools – after all, so many did. From their point of view we were the first delegation of ‘intellectuals’ from the West since the war, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ – a phrase which caused us discomfort and highlighted our differences from them – and were to be humoured and pampered. Behind them were the horrors of the Great Famine, deliberately engineered by Stalin, the Purges, the Gulag, the crushing devastations of the war, the killing of the Jews during the Black Years – not over yet – unspeakable injustices, torments, murders, tortures. While writing this, I read that the mass graves recently discovered and acknowledged were because Stalin, continually imprisoning hundreds of thousands of his people, was told the prisons were overcrowded, did not feel inclined to waste money on building more, and solved the problem by having the prisoners shot and then beginning again. Behind the Russians we were meeting was this history. And Stalin was still alive, watching like a spider from his Kremlin. We did not know then, but Stalin read everything published in the Soviet Union – novels, short stories, poems, and all play and film scripts. He had caused songs to be written, with prescribed words, suitable for different stages of the war and even for battles. He certainly believed that the artist is the engineer of the human soul – as he was always being quoted as saying. The opening of the Soviet Archives has fleshed out the character of dear Uncle Joe.

Their visitors must have seemed to them like not very bright children. I have oftened wondered if this visit contributed to remarks – by ex KGB, GRU, and other intelligence agents – like: ‘The Western communists and fellow travellers are like naive children, and when the Soviet tanks roll over them they will be crying, Welcome, Welcome.’ No, the still innocent would be crying, ‘But, comrades, stop your tanks; you are making a terrible mistake, and you are sullying the glorious name of communism.’ As late as the 1960s, a Jew from Israel, not a communist but left labour, was arrested and imprisoned in Prague and charged with being a fascist-Zionist agent of international imperialism – decoded, this meant a Jew – and when in prison pleaded with his torturers and jailors, ‘Comrades, how can you soil the hands of the working class in this way, how can you hurt yourselves and all the decent people in the world by such behaviour?’

Our first official engagement was around a long table in a formal room, and there were twenty or so of us. Surkov opened with a florid official speech, which set the tone for all their succeeding speeches.

The gulf between the Soviet writers – or rather the official party line – and the British contingent was unbridgeable. This was evident from that first speech, and the distance between us widened rather than narrowed throughout the visit.

Naomi opened for our side. A middle-aged woman, in appearance not unlike a friendly terrier, she said she had been in Moscow during the twenties, she had had the most wonderful love affair, and why had the Soviet Union become hostile to Free Love? She remembered bathing nude in the Moskva River with her lover, and all kinds of good times. Once, the Soviet Union had been a beacon of progress in matters amorous, but ‘you have all become so reactionary’. Needless to say, Arnold and I were burning with shame and embarrassment. The seriousness of the occasion! Our responsibilities as representatives of our country! Now I wonder if this wasn’t a pretty good way of dealing with all the rhetoric and bombast, with an impossible situation.

Then Douglas Young demanded to put the case for the exploited colonies, speaking for Scotland, England’s vassal. He wore a kilt at times during the trip, for dramatic emphasis. (He was very tall and very thin, and a kilt was even more dramatic on him than on an ordinary man.) On every possible occasion he stood up to speak for downtrodden and oppressed Scotland. I have no doubt he was a sincere Scottish nationalist, but he had his tongue in his cheek. The communists were obliged to rise to their feet and cheer him whenever he spoke of oppressed nations, so waves of noisy insincerity were continually disrupting whatever meeting we were having.